Wish Away Queen
by Silberias
Summary: Wishes and wants are different--Sarah learned that lesson the hard way 17 years ago when she lost her baby brother to Jareth, the Goblin King. She's gone 17 years without breaking her vow to never wish again, but a moment of weakness is all it takes...


This was a plot bunny which ate my brain. It takes place after an indeterminate past. Sarah is 32/33, married, and 17 years ago, she lost her baby brother to the Goblin King.

* * *

Toby looked no different than he had in his red and white striped PJs from The Night. He slept peacefully in the crib, beautifully and cruelly ageless since she'd last seen him when she was fifteen. It had been seventeen years since she'd laid eyes upon her baby brother-seventeen years and eight minutes since she'd lost him to Jareth.

The last nine and three quarters minutes had been spent arguing with aforementioned Goblin King-a careless wish, after such a long time without wishing at all (for wishing was far more powerful than longing, and Sarah had longed for so long to see Toby again), and it was all…nearly undone. A prophecy Jareth had never told her in an effort to preserve her innocence and her fairytales, combined with her violent wish to not set eyes upon him again after she had lost Toby-she had probably always been meant for this.

Jareth was destined to find a queen to mother a child who was lost-a woman to be the loving queen for Jareth and who was never to have become a mother in her own right. Such a pity, his own mother would croon to him after his father would leave to retrieve the newest wish-away. Although the curse had existed for time immemorial for his family, Jareth's mother had always wanted him to be her own more than he already was-and she had desperately wanted him to be the man to break it, to live the life he would have lived had he not been wished away.

Sarah wanted to have none of it-but she would remain in the Underground until either her acceptance of destiny or her death. Her wish had ensured that. Toby, thankfully never turned into a goblin, had been enchanted by her friends as well as Jareth to sleep until a mother came to the Underground for him. Sarah's role was to play that part of mother, and to her once-and-still baby brother no less. Toby was the child who was lost, and it didn't matter that she was the boy's sister.

Thirty two year old Sarah Williams-Blake was left alone for a time by her would-be husband-alone with the unwakeable child, in the silent throne room. It was not a time of festivity, tensions were high in the town surrounding the Castle-Beyond-the-Goblin-City. Goblins waited on baited breath for her decision.

What would Arnold think of her disappearances-would Jareth remove her completely from his life? So what if she'd been shaken by the news that she was barren, it was no cause to have broken a nearly twenty year vow…

_I wish I could raise a child up from one even as big as Toby, I wish that I were Underground with Toby…Right now…_ had escaped her lips as twin trails of tears had fallen down her face. Arnold had left that afternoon-he had wanted children so badly, an army of toddlers with striking black hair and fired green eyes-and had been gone for hours when she had wished. For the first two years of their marriage Sarah had longed-because longing was not wishing, in the most technical sense-for a child. She had gone to the physician as a last resort; she was a healthy woman whose family had no history of fertility issues.

Jareth had appeared not in as dramatic a fashion as he had more than a decade before. _Precious, I have never been able to keep myself from answering your wishes. You haven't wished for something in such a long time…_ His face was in her mirror an instant before she sensed him in the room-the room she and Arnold had dubbed "the Baby's room," when they had bought the house a year before.

Toby, all the while during her introspection, did not stir, his face did not twitch even once in sleep. His stasis was perfect, awaiting a woman to look after him as Karen was never able to. The re-ordering of time had happened after Sarah's last wish after losing Toby, and Sarah's parents had forgotten they had a child-Toby's crib still had the stickers on it as Sarah's father and Karen prepared to try for a child, subconsciously asserting their will and wish to have one bless their marriage. Less than a year after Sarah had accidentally wished away their first child, she had a new baby brother named Trevor. Three more boys and one girl made their way into the Williams family-and after the last one had started pre-school, Karen had informed her husband and step-daughter that she just felt like she should have had another child.

Trevor hated Sarah, because she was, as their father teased, his "Other Mother," as Sarah tried to make up her mistakes against Toby by doing right by Trevor. The other kids weren't such immediate reminders of the Baby Who Was Lost. With Trevor, it had been the most motherly she'd ever been able to be-her loss of Toby had apparently cursed her to be without children herself. It was Cruel Magic, as Hoggle had termed it four hours ago when he'd tried to comfort Sarah through the mirror, before she'd wished. Cruel Magic which was the changes wrought upon a human as they spent a period of time in the Labyrinth.

Sarah bowed her head in sadness and shame over her past transgressions, preparing for a long evaluation of her failings.

And then, entering on the scene with a pitter-patter of tiny feet never grown bigger than a toddler's-a goblin entered.

It hiccupped gently-almost the hiccup of a child's cry-and pitter-pattered up to where Sarah knelt transfixed by her brother. A cherub-face, transfigured and transformed by goblin-hood, stared up at her as it tugged her sleeve. It's voice, rough like sandpaper, cut through the silent room.

"Wish Away Queen, dance Baby King awake-you the Wish Away Queen, dance Sleepy Babe awake!"

A small goblin peeked into the room from a grate in the wall-the cackling giggle of a three year old zinging through the air.

"Goblin King sings Wish Away Babe to sleep-sing about dancing out of dreamland, Gardiner and Knight sing too."

"Dance him wakey-wakey, Wish Away Queen!" voices started to pop out of the woodwork, faces grotesque and beautiful like babies newly born, and soon the room was filled with noise, a cacophony far and above any Sarah had ever heard in her mundane life Above.

Sarah had been unable to keep her somber expression as the noise began to take on a beat and rhythm, soothing her nerves and easing her hurts-and everything was dancing. She was mid-way through standing, half considering taking up Toby to at least try what they urged-

"Quiet!" Jareth's voice, graveled and beautiful-just because Sarah was married didn't mean she was dead-stoppered all sound. A hundred pairs of eyes watched as the Goblin King stalked up to the Wish Away Queen. Unaffected by the room full of stares, Jareth put a hand on the arm Sarah had been reaching toward Toby. His face was taught with sorrow-although Sarah knew not what for.

"Sarah, precious thing, do not lay a hand on him." She tried to recoil from his cruel words, but found she couldn't under his iron grip. His voice was tight, controlled, and she could almost hear a slight panic in it's tone.

"The moment you touch him, the change will begin to occur which should have begun years ago. Only by heeding what they," he swept the room with his eyes, focusing on the goblin at Sarah's side in particular, "have already mentioned, will you prevent him from becoming a goblin. I love his boy more than my own being, and if you turn him into a goblin then you shall have no safe harbor from me in my kingdom."

Sarah's mouth went dry-if she so much as laid a finger upon her brother she would really have lost, finally after so many years of assuming she had, _taking it for granted,_ that she had. If she touched him then she would have lost her husband Arnold, her family (Robert, Karen, Trevor, Trudy, Timothy, and Thomas), her home, and all of it for nothing.

"Sarah, you still have the ability to wring magic from the air-" Jareth began, no doubt in an effort to break the enchantment right now, before Sarah grabbed him forcibly by the hand he still had on her-and dragged him out of the room to at least the stairwell leading to what was probably still the Escher Room.

"I won't touch him." Jareth's face, already stretched with sadness, contorted in pain at her cruel words. They were both, she supposed, still very cruel and willful people. "I won't touch him if you don't love me." Jareth's face lit-she had guessed his professed love which she had rejected (in vain, as well since she had still lost her brother) was something true because it wasn't what it seemed at first glance.

"But I also won't touch him until I love you, and you will not be magicking that love into my head. You are going to have to earn it."

Jareth did not seem to know if he should be pleased or offended-and Sarah decided he had settled for placated.

"It would seem that I should invite you to dinner, in an effort to convince you to wake my boy."

* * *

"Jareth, why did they refer to me as the Wish Away Queen?" Sarah was picking over the dishes which had been laid out before her-it would seem that the only food the Underground shared in common with the Above was peaches. Jareth had indeed made an effort to select food which looked like what was eaten in the above, but whenever he had experienced a loss he had filled that space with peaches.

"The Wish Away Queen is the wife of the Goblin King. Her primary duty is to tend to the wished away during their stay here, as well as to tend to the Castle-Beyond's goblins. The goblins, other than the most basic guards, here are all the newest goblins. They know little of being goblins, and much about being young children." He paused for a beat, considering his words carefully it seemed.

"My mother, and her predecessors of course, used to dance with them to keep them entertained and in line. The Goblin King, when not haranguing Runners or running the kingdom in general, has a duty to provide music and song for his queen and subjects to make merry to."

Sarah nodded, trying to match it all up in her mind.

"And what of when there is no Wish Away Queen?"

"It is the sworn quest of the Goblin King to await one, but in the interim he must take on the duties of the other office as well. The curse is therefore dealt with faster than it would otherwise have been-for instance I had the chance to bond with Toby in a way I never would have had there been a Wish Away Queen."

"So you didn't know I was going to be the Wish Away Queen?" Sarah asked, quickly filling her mouth with what looked to be purple mashed-potatoes. It was a troubling enough question as it was, without having to elaborate for his Nibs.

"Of course not-although I began to take note of you when one of my goblins pointed out that you would never give up in your quest to save Toby. I was deeply in love with you by the time I took your hand to dance with you. Make no mistake that, although I knew my ultimate choice of queen was nearly out of my hands, I loved you then and that I love you now. The fact that you are here is icing on the…cake."

His bi-colored eyes glittered with good cheer as he recounted his tale.

He kindly didn't point out that she was here because she had had a weak moment, and she decided to return the kindness by not pointing out any flaws in his conclusions or assumptions.

* * *

_Nobody knew-what kind of magic spell to use._ Jareth was singing, and the goblins were dancing, and the Wish Away Queen was tenderly lifting a swiftly wakening child out of an elaborate crib.

And then she and the Goblin King (as well as everyone else) were dancing.

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